Videography and Photography Services for Wildlife Translocations 188 views

About SWM project

The Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM) Project is funded by the European Union 11th Development Fund for the Africa, Pacific and Caribbean (ACP) region. The SWM project is implemented by a consortium of organisations (FAO, CIRAD, CIFOR and WCS) in the Kavango Zambezi (KaZa) Transfrontier conservation area. The overall objective of the SWM project is to reconcile the challenges of wildlife conservation with those of food security, promoting sustainable and legal exploitation of wildlife by local populations. As a result, SWM is supporting the management of community conservancies in Zambia and Zimbabwe. This includes promoting consumptive and non-consumptive wildlife based economic activities, benefiting the communities. Furthermore, SWM is also supporting the communities to mitigate human-wildlife conflict and to improve the supply of alternative protein (livestock, fish, non-timber forest products). In Zimbabwe, SWM Project is being implemented in wards 3, 4 and 5 of Binga District.

Wildlife translocations, defined as “the deliberate movement of organisms from one site for release in another”, have been used in conjunction as a conservation tool for a number of decades as wild populations become increasingly fragmented and endangered. The SWM Project conducted two wildlife surveys over the past two years using the line transect method and the camera trapping technique. Results from these surveys revealed that the wildlife populations in the proposed Mucheni Community Conservancy (MCC) are generally low and that there is a need to restore the wildlife population for wildlife-based enterprises that would lead to local development. The studies showed that wildlife populations could be revived by re-introducing some plain games species (e.g. impala, kudu, eland and zebra), which already exist in low numbers in the Conservancy. The translocation exercise will involve the capturing of wildlife in Save Valley Conservancy (SVC) and transportation of these wildlife species to Mucheni CC by road. At the release site the wildlife species will be transferred into a boma where they will spend 2 weeks acclimatizing to the environment and habitat of Mucheni CC.

The SWM Project Communications Unit would like to engage a professional company to provide videography and photography services to document the translocation.